Spirit in Action
Resister - Doing Time for Doing Good
Bruce Dancis is author of Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War, was raised by secular Jewish parents, nurtured at the NY Society for Ethical Culture, and became a passionate advocate for social justice and student leader as a student at Cornell U.
- Duration:
- 55m
- Broadcast on:
- 12 Apr 2015
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives Of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, Creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Bruce Dances is our guest today for Spirit in Action, and he's author of a new book Resistor, a story of protest and prison during the Vietnam War Raised by secular Jewish parents and nurtured at the New York Society for Ethical Culture Bruce became a passionate advocate for social justice and student leader at Cornell University A leader in their SDS chapter in its heyday and out front as a draft resistor Bruce's experiences of the turbulent late 1960s, including his time in prison Have a lot to tell us about organizing, ethics, and courage He joins us by phone from California Bruce, I'm really excited to have you here today for Spirit in Action Thanks for inviting me Mark The book, Resistor, a story of protest and prison during the Vietnam War You say at the beginning, you question yourself Why another book about the 60s, and you put it off for a long time Would you tell the folks why you chose to write this at this point? Well for two reasons, I mean one reason was the practical reason that sort of life intervened I had a job, a very strenuous job as a newspaper editor And I had a family, my wife and I had a blended family of four children They certainly kept me on my toes It wasn't until I took a buyout from the paper where I worked, the second M.O.B. that I actually had the time to seriously think about writing a book But the second reason, the more important reason is that I thought that the whole experience of Vietnam Were the oppositions of the war in Vietnam, the draft resistance movement, the experience of draft resistors in prison Had basically been underreported or not reported Many people had lost sight of what happened during those times There's misinformation about what happened to the student movement And I thought that my book would offer a different type of history One that I think is accurate, it is my story, but I did a lot of historical research And I tried to present, at least from the inside, what it was like to be part of those movements I'm going to go out on a limb, and I'm going to suggest another reason And if I'm wrong, just let me know, I'm not invested in being right about these things You mentioned at the end of the book, in the aftermath of being in prison The nightmares that you had after you got out of prison And I think you had to keep your nose clean because you're on parole And who knows when they'll just haul you back for any pretext, whatsoever Then you said when you started doing the book, the nightmares came back Part of my assumption was that avoiding this thing I mean, it's a tender place, including the time in prison Does that resonate with you at all or not? Well, you know, I had sort of forgotten about the nightmares As I explained in my book, you know, well, prison was... I was fine in prison I didn't know it was never abused, I'd never gotten twenty fights with anyone But it was a scary time, you know, I was ready to fight at all circumstances I slept in a very narrow bed in prison, and my arms sat my sides I wake up at the slightest second, and after I was on parole I used to get these nightmares that I was back in prison It was usually the FBI had somehow, or the local police had somehow framed me for something And I was back exactly where I was before And these eventually went away in my 30s and 40s And I guess when I was writing the sections about prison, they came back to me I did not expect them to come back to me But they did not begin until I started doing the research and writing on the book So I don't know how that affected my motivation for writing the book You know, some of the people that I've been very impressed by Are the conscientious objectors from World War II The way that the government did it, then putting them in work camps together And how that changed, how they worked forward in their life So many of them, a really incredibly high percentage of them Became lifelong social activists of some sort I don't know if that's as true with the experience of Vietnam War In part, because I think they dealt with resistors to the war Conscience objectors, everything differently They did during World War II What's your experience of the people you knew who were extremely active in SDS Students for Democratic Society and as resistors? Let me speak first of the people who I was in prison with My closest friends, one became a doctor who works on occupational health and safety He actually works in the VA hospital a lot of the times And he's been dedicated in his profession to helping people Another one became a reporter for the New York Times And I became a journalist, although I always had a social conscience in my writings That was very, very strong impetus for me, even when I was writing about movies Or rock and roll or something like that You know, I think my values have remained largely intact My friends who were in SDS, many of us went into professions But they were often involved with, like, the lawyers worked on legal aid Some of the doctors I know work in very poor communities Other people are environmental activists Another friend of mine was a news director for a progressive radio station for many years I mean, things like that, I wouldn't say that's across the board But I think many of us did not have the kind of change that we saw Someone like David Horowitz or someone like that who sort of went to the other side Our activism may have changed, but our belief You know, what we care about has remained dissimilar You know, we mean caring about poverty, caring about war And equality, racism, sexism, things like that I have to ask you about your perception of David Horowitz I actually was on a radio program He was one of the guests and I was the person set opposite to him And this was on Christian radio station And David Horowitz, of course not Christian, not religious at all And he was giving all the reasons why we should go into Iraq And he was cutting me down because I, as a Quaker And as a pacifist myself, I had views very different than his And I would quote the Bible and he would say, "Oh, we don't have to deal with that" I was kind of nervy on Christian radio station Why do you think he went to the dark side? You know, I really don't know, I met David once when he was working for Rampart We had talked about a story I had been impressed with his early career He was a historian who was writing about the Cold War And he wrote some books, containment and revolution It was one of them, something like that, which I thought were very good I admired him as a journalist later I really don't understand, you know, why he did that And Frank, they haven't spent a lot of time, you know, worrying about it I'm sort of disappointed, but what can you do? You probably know him better than I do I don't know, I've never met him So let's get back to the story of Bruce Stancis The story of protest and prison during the Vietnam War First of all, I want to say Bruce, I really enjoyed the book Since I'm 59, I was in high school or in middle school Through much of this stuff going on in Vietnam I definitely observed it, even though I didn't quite live it In 1972, when I became 18, that's when they stopped the draft I never actually had to face the draft You, in 1965, you're going to start college, you're facing the draft And you've been raised with this ethical society This strong sense of doing what's right Could you explain a little bit of that background to our listeners So that they understand where you come from? Sure, I come from a secular Jewish background in New York City My mother was an atheist, and my dad, I guess, would have seen himself as an agnostic But they both wanted me to get some kind of spiritual or ethical or moral guidance So for ten years, they took me to the Sunday school of the New York Society of Ethical Culture Ethical culture is sort of a group of free thinkers I think there are people there who are believers I probably most are not, but it teaches the Golden Rule I guess the main principle, by the time we were a little bit older, like a high school age We were going to, we did tours of Buddhist temples, a variety of protestants and Catholic churches The idea was that we were reading about the religions of the world It was to try to create young men and women who had strong ethical beliefs But they were not necessarily religious But it was very, it was a direct connection from that for someone to care about poverty Or issues like that, which was very easy to see in New York City When you drive from one neighborhood to another So I think that's what my parents were trying to do They were not proselytizers, they always let me make up my mind They offered to let me have a vomit, so if I wanted to As almost most of my Jewish friends were and I didn't But they gave me that choice My parents were strong believers in letting, you know, educating your kids so they can make their own decisions How important is the Jewish part of that? I mean, you say secular Jews That means that your family comes, you know, is descended from people in the Middle Eastern area How important is that in terms of identity? Of course this is post World War II Where I think Jewish identity became more important than ever because it was so threatened Right, it wasn't direct in terms of the Bible or anything like that or the Old Testament But it was in terms of understanding both the suffering of the Jewish people And the commitment of Jews to social justice I remember seeing the movie "Judgment at Nuremberg" when I was around 14 Which was the first movie to really, American movie to really deal with the Holocaust and the death camps and all that And my mother had told me much later that I was really changed by that That I had never seen such human suffering, you know, as was depicted in that film And to me, I saw a relationship between the German people who did nothing to stop Hitler And what was going on in the South and the white people who were doing nothing to stop segregation And the degradation of people of color You know, I saw the necessity from that movie that if you were going to be a decent person you had to resist evil And there's certainly nothing more evil than the Nazis, but I saw a parallel to the bull conners And to the people in the South who were maintaining segregation Well, you do start your activism with respect to racism when you talk about it in "Resister" One thing that was kind of wonderful is your kind of marathon run And you were the one white man involved in this Say a little bit about that, because it's such a wonderful little vignette Sure, this was at the time of the Selma crisis in the spring 1965 You know, when all those peaceful demonstrators were beaten up in Selma, Alabama There were protests all over the country, there was a big march in Harlem And a friend of mine, an African-American friend of mine in high school He and I had both been on the track, I was the captain of the track team, he had now graduated He was my predecessor, and he had gone on to college He had heard that core of the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the leading civil rights groups With good a sponsor, a run, a marathon run with maybe 17, 18 teenagers Going in with chaperones, going in station wagons To carry an unlit torch from New York City to be presented to President Johnson To show that the torch of freedom had gone out in Selma, Alabama And the government needed to take some action to relight it So the idea we did each run like a mile or two Get back in the car and rest and then pass it on Just a long slow road, not on parkways or freeways, but on the old roads from New York to Washington Unfortunately, as anyone who's been a runner knows, you just can't decide I'm gonna go run a mile or two miles if you haven't done it before, especially if you're a smoker And I'm afraid that a lot of the people with our groups had no running experience whatsoever And they were game, you know, they were as committed as I was to the cause, but they couldn't run You know, they could do a hundred yards and then they'd be exhausted But there were three of us who were you, I had experienced as a runner, as a cross-country runner in high school Some other guys were in very good shape and could run The three of us did a good stretch of it As I said, my friend who was unable to go, so I turned out to be the only white kid in the group That was fine, we all got along wonderfully After a couple of days, we arrived at the White House Where we met by President Johnson's one African-American aide Clifford Alexander And a very liberal congressman from New York City named William Fitzrion We presented our torch, made a statement, and then drove back But it was fun, it was a good demonstration, it was really the first serious commitment I had ever made I had gone to the March on Washington two years earlier, as a fifteen-year-old with my aunt But this was really the beginnings of my activism When I got back, I did some more work for core And we tried to raise money for SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee And when I got to college, I wanted to continue my work both in civil rights and in the anti-war movement And hence your involvement with students for democratic society, SDS Did you get involved with them right away when you got to college? I did, there had been a chapter earlier, but it had disbanded by the time I got there And I was part of a group of people in the fall '65 who organized the chapter It's funny, I was able to find out exactly what data first meaning was from my FBI file Which I got much later in the 70s, thousands of pages Which said that yes, someone, I attended this SDS meeting and said I wanted to work on setting up a draft counseling center In downtown Ithaca, so it provided me with a precise date and time of what was Even though we had done nothing illegal at that time, except maybe in my thoughts But now that's when we started I assume you got that release of information under the Freedom of Information Act That's right I think that it's pretty natural to come out of prison with the sense that they're watching my remove And you know, the slightest infraction and you're back in Did you find out from your file that that was or wasn't true? Oh, it was true Yes, as soon as I got out of prison, the condition of my parole was that I go back to college And some friends of mine who had been at Cornell had moved to California to a new campus there In Santa Cruz, in the new campus of the University of California And they arranged to get me in there and I got right back into the movement We formed a group called the Santa Cruz Radical Action Project We started an alternative magazine And all of my recordings keep up in there Fortunately for me, I had a liberal parole officer At one point, I think it must have been in 1972 at the time the mixed administration was doing Heavy bombing of Hanoi and Haifang in North Vietnam And a national student strike was called And I made some very strong Milton speeches about how we needed to take to the streets We needed to protest vigorously And my parole officer told me that the FBI wanted to revoke my parole And he said he defended me, saying that I did not lose my rights to free speech when I was on parole I think without his help and without my friends making sure I didn't get re-arrested When other people were, I was able to stay out of prison again Back to racism One of the things that you chart And it's really, I've thought about this myself in observing history And what the course of events was You know, Martin Luther King is a big hero these days Martin Luther King Day, all of that But his star had eclipsed by the time that '67 By the time he was killed, he was considerably less popular Because the black power movement had emerged And it's like, we're not going to take this crap anymore Instead of, you know, we'll face with Christian humility How did you feel in that transition? Part of me felt like, okay, you were still on this non-violence thing for quite a while And so the black power thing, how much did that contrary you? Well, on the one hand, the people who were first pushing for black power Wouldn't have Stokely Carmichael, the people in SNCC And those are the people I most respected in the civil rights movement I thought the SNCC activists were the ones who were always putting their bodies on the line in Mississippi They were sort of doing the most difficult work of voter registration And things like that, a great peril in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia in the deep south So when they turned that, I had to pay attention to that And I was sort of confronted with, well, what am I going to do in the summer of 1966? This is at the end of my freshman year of Cornell A minister at Cornell, and in Paul Gibbons, he was a chaplain, I think, for the United Church of Christ Had a program in East Harlem, which was a black and Puerto Rican neighborhood They were bringing in Cornell students to work with the East Harlem Tenons Council Which is an anti-poverty group that had organized rent strikes and was trying to organize a community He brought in around 20-25 Cornell students to do different things I was involved in tenant organizing, other people were involved in setting up a day camp for kids Somebody else wasn't working on setting up a food co-op And, you know, I was at torn, should I go through with this? I mean, is the black community telling me, no, we don't want white people in here anymore We want you to go organize your own communities Reverend Gibbons, or Paul, convinced me that, well, East Harlem is a little bit different There were many Puerto Ricans there who didn't have the same growing, say, separatism in the black movement There was also all the towning communities The apartment I ended up moving into had a muzuza on the front door Indicating that some orthodox Jews had lived there in the not too distant past So I did go in and I spent that summer working with tenants And, you know, trying to get our landlords to get rid of the rats, clean up some of the garbage, fill the holes It was a very interesting experience for me, I mean, very educational experience for me And really seeing poverty firsthand You know, I grew up in New York City, I saw the buildings, you know, in poor neighborhoods all the time But only from the outside, I had some friends who were very poor, and I'd see their houses But for the most part, I didn't have that experience of living in an apartment with cockroaches With holes with rats and things like that And I didn't have the experience of trying to work with people to try to ameliorate those conditions So that was a very important summer for me How much of your experience of that poverty was that it was for people of African descent Versus, you know, there's immigrants of all sorts following the war, including a lot of Jews And the immigrants are usually on the poor end of the spectrum That's when they walk their way up after a while So did you have friends that crossed the spectrum of all colors and countries? Oh sure, you know, growing up in New York City, you know, I did In East Harlem, we were close to friends with some of the young Puerto Rican men, you know, about my age At that point, we sort of shared an affinity for the new rock and roll that was coming You know, the Beatles, the Stones, the British Invasion, we all sort of had long hair They all were anti-war, at least they said they were, you know, to us We actually organized, on Hiroshima Day, 1966, we organized a march from East Harlem To join the bigger march in Midtown Manhattan And a lot of the, you know, my neighbors took part in that It was quite a time, you know, I found that they, certainly the Puerto Rican folks accepted us quite readily And I saw the mixed reaction, more mixed from the African Americans in the neighborhood But when we were organizing tenants, you know, maybe in the building where we had the most success There were maybe 25 apartments, and we had someone from 20 of them coming to our meetings To write a petition to force the landlords to make improvements in their buildings I got a very clear picture, I think, you in the book, "Resister, Story of Protest" and "Prison" during the Vietnam War Of the steps you went through that increased your willingness to act It still seemed to me that you were perhaps one of the more cautious or level-headed Or let's try and find alternatives to doing something outrageous It still seemed to me that you were on that end of the debate frequently But I could see your motivation being upped increasingly through the years there, the three or four years But you tore up your draft card on the very early end, really, of that radicalization Right, you know, at that point, I'd say I was probably more on the cutting edge I mean, I had a hard time deciding, I mean, by the time I turned 18, I was already at the end of my freshman year in college I was pretty young, starting college And for me, the decision was, "Are you going to register or not?" If non-registration meant you could go to jail, for sure At that point, I wasn't ready to make that step, but I did feel that the student deferment known as the two S deferment was unfair I felt that, you know, as someone from a middle-class home with my parents at Ghana College It was expected that I would go to college, I had the support financially to go to college Whereas my peers who came from poor families, who didn't have the same background Couldn't get a student deferment and would be declared 1A and eligible for the draft So I felt that was sort of a class privilege that I wouldn't accept And at that point, I applied for CO status, which I think I would have gotten But as the course of the year went on, I felt increasingly that the CO, while a much more honorable deferment than the others, had some of the same class restrictions That is, the forms you have to fill out to get a CO, you have to write an essay on your belief in the use of force You had to explain why you were against all wars And give a religious or philosophical explanation for that, and I felt I could write that I went to Cornell University, you know, but other people, that was inaccessible And I eventually decided that any cooperation with a selective service system That was drafting young men to go fight an award that I considered immoral, illegal and unjust It was just not for me, and that's when I decided to become a non-co operator The method I chose was to, at a rally at Cornell, tear up my draft cards in four pieces Read a statement and bring it to my draft board, it was sort of my declaration that I'm not going to go along with this anymore Do you still feel clear from this incredible distance from that event? Do you still feel clear that that was the right decision to make? Obviously, the draft movement did not blossom in the way that you hoped it would The resistance to the draft did not blossom to the tens of thousands Maybe hundreds of thousands that you thought it might grow to And your action was part of maybe nurturing that along So do you still feel with hindsight that it was the right choice? I think it was the right choice for me personally Now I always had two motivations, one was the personal What is going to be my position with respect to the draft? And there I felt that non-cooperation made the most sense to me It was the most honorable thing to do, it was the most straightforward It was in keeping with what I believed But I also had political goals, I mean my goal was to build a much larger movement I didn't want to be standing out here by myself, even though I was the first person in upstate New York state And the first person in SDS to do this, I wanted to build a big movement And we then went on, after I tore up my draft cards, some of my friends and I We were active in an early Cornell anti-draft group We organized the first mass draft card burning, which was in April 1967 And from that we went on to work with the group called the Resistance And we had a series of draft card turn-ins in 1967 and '68 All of which I hope would sort of have an exponential growth Okay, we'll have a thousand across the country on this date The next time we do it in a few months we'll have more than that And then we'll have more than that and soon we'll fill the courts and fill the jails You know, with young men resisting the draft And fill the protests of all the people who cared for those young men, the parents, the girlfriends There are other friends who weren't ready to do that action But although we did get quite a number, you know, in the thousands of people who did take a public action A legal action against the draft, the movement never got as big as we thought And the government had an effective strategy in dealing with us And it was quite apparent at the time that they picked off the ringleaders Later on when people like Ramsey Clark, who had been the Attorney General under the Johnson administration wrote his memoirs, it was interviewed, he said, "Yeah, our policy was to go after the ringleaders We never wanted to prosecute all those young men who were doing that" And in fact, some studies that came out in the late '70s showed that nationwide, about 90% of people who broke the law broke the draft law in a variety of ways, we never prosecuted And even of those who were prosecuted, many of them had judges who would not send them to jail or gave them suspended sentences So the number of people who went to jail, we went to federal prison for some kind of draft offense was no more than maybe 3,000 And over that 3,000, some of those were children's witnesses who didn't believe in a draft but not necessarily for anti-war reasons So the number of conscious draft resistors who were there as a protest against the war and the draft was probably never more than 1,000 at the most Anyway, so in that sense, yes, I did think that as a movement, any movement whose goal was to put people in jail maybe was doomed to failure But, you know, I think we gave it a good try I think we did certainly increase the seriousness of the anti-war movement and I do think the anti-war movement as a whole was successful in constraining both the Johnson and the Nixon administrations from bringing much more carnage to Vietnam and Southeast Asia If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit In Action This is a Northern Spirit Radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org On that site, you'll find more than eight and a half years of our programs for free listening and download You'll find connections to our guests, like to Bruce Dances, who's with us here today You'll also find a place to leave comments, and we love two-way communication So please post a comment when you visit There's also a place to leave donations, that's how we make our income to support this work It is full-time labor, please support us, but also, especially, I want to encourage you to support your local community radio station They bring you a slice of news and of music that you could just know where else So please do support both with your hands and with your wallet, your local community radio station Again, we're with Bruce Dances He's author of a new book, Resistor, a story of protest and prison during the Vietnam War He was imprisoned, he was one of the earlier leaders of the draft resistance movement The book captures a whole lot of information about activism at that time For me, it was so instructive, Bruce, because I was learning about what wasn't happening in the succeeding generations or the way that it was happening differently So seeing it from the inside, and you certainly were in the center of so much of it at Cornell and in the draft resistance movement, that it's eye-opening for me You were just talking about draft resistance and the hope that it would blossom and lead to the whole downfall of the war in Vietnam What's your estimation of why the draft has not been activated? After Carter asked for it to be reinstated, but not activated in 1980, 1979 My sense is that it has not been activated because they don't want to go back to those times They were afraid that Bruce Dances would rise up again Without putting me out front there, we're just kind of you No, I thought if they learned anything from that is that you cannot have conscription for an unpopular war That the resistance you get to that can be so great that it will undermine the war effort As you said, you're a little bit younger, but if you were coming to a base between 1964 and say 1970 And you're a man, or the draft became such a central part of your life You know, what you would do with it didn't really matter if you were pro-war or anti-war Most people did not volunteer to go to Vietnam and most wanted to stay out of the armed forces And how you did that became a central part of your life And I think they didn't want to replicate that experience I mean clearly the draft was the prosecution of the draft The draft laws and violers was in shambles by the early 70s And that must have been known to different presidential administration since then One of the other ways that I've been concerned about war I became a war tax resistor in 1982 I imagine you resisted the phone tax for instance During the late 60s when that was being used to fund the Vietnam War In 1982 I became a war tax resistor And I had one of the scariest and you know trivial in some ways But scariest events of my life I was spearheaded I guess for our local war tax resistance group in Milwaukee An action where I offered to pay in food for my taxes owed And the group carried it in, you know, and it got excellent news coverage and all of that I mean IRS given food for thought It was quite excellent, but for me the scariest moment was We had been leaf leading each week in front of the IRS office The day that we're going to do the action on April 15th I got ready, arrived, was to arrive ahead of time to set up things if the rest of the group would come And here were six strong imposing at least eight inches taller than me each one of them Standing in front of this door in uniform like you're not going to cross here I felt my bowels get a little bit weak and I'm not a cowardly person For me one of the big surprises, believing in ethical and moral people as I do Is that war tax resistance never caught on, that we're still, now it's the largest item in our budget You pay for military and so it felt to me in the same way that you weren't willing to take The preferred position of someone who was educated so who could get a deferment from going to war You weren't willing to take that privilege I'm not willing to send my money out to pay for the killing in my name How have you dealt with ideas like that? I mean has that been tempting to you? Well I have thought about that, you know, I guess perhaps the person did have a deterrent effect on me that I didn't want to go to jail again I guess I came to believe that people have to resist injustice in a wide variety of ways And for some people committing civil disobedience and risking the consequences You know is the right thing for them to do, I certainly felt like that when I was younger You know once I was older I had a family to support and all that I'm sure I would have been much more reticent to take an action like that So I mean I admire people who do that, I admire the pacifist or like Dan Bergen Throughout his father Daniel Bergen throughout his life has been arrested taking part in demonstrations Against nuclear weapons and things like that And I admire that tremendously I haven't been able to do that myself, maybe I will again soon now that I'm retired and my kids are grown up But you know I began to pour my energy into my life and my career And I tried in my writings to write about racism and about poverty and injustice and things like that But I sort of let a thousand flowers bloom would be my attitude You mentioned a couple times in the book, a book by Willard Galen in the service of their country I read that perhaps 30 years ago Right And it gave me an insight and it was about people like you People who voluntarily went to prison rather than evade the draft You were not a draft dodger, you were a draft resistor He talks about the psychology and how that beats on your mind that going to prison When did you read that book and did you recognize yourself in the book? Oh absolutely, no I thought that book came out I think around 1970-71 So I'm sure I read it after I was in prison and he didn't include any names So I mean I think what he was writing about was the Allenwood prison farm in Pennsylvania And the Lewisburg penitentiary that was right near it No a lot of it rang very true to me I think I was fortunate and the prison I went to was not as heavy as the penitentiary I went to a prison in Ashland Kentucky that was a medium security prison I mean it had gun towers and barbed wire fences and all that But it was mostly guys under 25 who were doing relatively short sentences That is you didn't have a lifers in there, you had guys doing five-year sentences, ten-year sentences Most were in for crimes like bank robbery or mail theft or drugs or interstate transportation of a stolen car Those kind of things you'd end up in federal prison for So it was kind of, you know, I'm not saying it wasn't scary or rough I mean there were fights every day in prison But I don't remember anyone getting killed in a made-ton in violence, you know, when I was in prison And I was able to very quickly find my support system in prison We had an informal group we formed called The Family, I was just our name for it That was made up of some of the more political or counter-cultural inmates So I've had some of the draft resistors, some of the druggies who were in there My best friend was a bank robber One of other guys was in for attempted murder on a federal narcotics officer A tough crime, but he was a good guy And we had black inmates and white inmates and we sort of banded together Both for mutual support, protection, sustenance, you know, we pooled our resources For buying cigarettes, coffee, cookies, things like that And you know, that was my source of friendship and support And it would've been hard to get through those times without them In Galen's book, I mean, the people who seemed to be in the most trouble with the ones who were more isolated And didn't have that kind of support network You know, I also had tremendous support from the outside I mean, my parents, although they did not want me to tear my draft card and tried to talk me out of it They were very, you know, obviously were heartbroken that I was sentenced to prison They visited me every month when they could, they took time off from their jobs So it was a 11 or 12 hour drive from New York City to Ashland, Kentucky, where I was My friends from Cornell visited me regularly In fact, you know, they had to sort of sometimes coordinate it Because I couldn't have that many visitors But generally the prison authorities let my friends, if they follow the procedures and signed up advance, come down and visit me I had a very active correspondence with friends on the outside I tried to read the newspapers, magazines, which is what I could get You know, so I tried to keep up with everything that was going on in 1969 and 70 When I was in prison, what was going on on the outside? So I never felt isolated, which I think is probably the worst thing that could happen to you if you're in prison In his book, Willard Galen, when he's talking about in the service of our country He talks about how painful that imprisonment is In this country, we tend to think, if you get some kind of physical punishment, that that's brutal and nasty In the very last chapter or two of his book, he talks about cruel and ununable punishment And he says at one point that he figured, you know, sure, take my pinky You just cut it off and I don't want to lose a year of my life in prison Or, you know, five years versus a hand, cut off the hand I'd rather have that physical punishment than lose five years of my life Did that make sense for you? Would you have rather given up a pinky Rather than have spent your year and a half? No, of course not. You know, I had the opportunity, up until the day I turned myself into the federal marshal I could have gone underground, I could have probably escaped to Canada had I wanted to do that I probably could have recanted, you know, and so, please, you know, I actually was too late for that But, you know, there are ways I could have avoided going to prison, so no, that was not something that I seriously thought about You know, I always thought, okay, if I go to prison, let me use the time for the best I'll study, you know, during the fervent time of activism in the late 60s I didn't have a chance to sit down and read a lot of books and all that I mean, I understood what I was fighting against and working against, but in prison I really be embarked on, of course, self-education Faculty members, sympathetic professors at Cornell sent me pretty much any book I wanted to read So I had a wide-ranging reading list in history and politics and economics and fiction that I hadn't read in years You know, I had an opportunity to do that, and I thought that really helped my home personal education, certainly helped pass the time I played basketball, I was a good basketball player, despite my being kind of small, so I loved doing that I got to play basketball pretty much every day when I was in prison, you know, during breaks, you know, after work You know, I mean, I think I tried to make the most out of the prison experience I made friendships that I have to this day, you know, they're very meaningful to me It certainly didn't break me, probably the hardest thing that happened to me was that my girlfriend broke up with me when I was in prison and I was hard to take, but I got over that Another little sideline of being in prison, you mentioned that when you got in you were giving up a pack-and-a-half-a-day habit Because it was going to be too expensive too much, you're losing too much good capital in there And yet the one picture that I saw in the book of you while you were in prison, you have a cigarette in your mouth Did you go back to it? I did go back to it, yes, so there was a, the one time I got in serious trouble And I had a couple of minor problems, I found out for my, I got my FBI file too from the Freedom of Information Act And they marked different times when I was "anti-administration" And I don't think they meant Nixon or Johnson, they meant the prison authorities But at one point, one of my best friends was having a hand, he was not a draft resistor, he was actually a bank robber Was having, getting half sold by one of the guards on duty And the guy started enforcing all sorts of rules against him and my friends, you know, he wasn't enforcing against other inmates So my friend, my friend lit up a cigarette after lights were out as people were doing all over the dorms, that was technically against the rules The guard told him to put the cigarette out, he said no, and then I yelled out, everybody light up So we started a cigarette smoking rebellion, and I ended up giving a speech against the guards, inside the guard room But I had, you know, what they, what they were doing, it was wrong, a bunch of us got carted off to the hole Which wasn't, it's not like the Shawshank Redemption, but a solitary confinement for ten days I went before the, I love this term, the Adjustment Committee, which was the court within the prison And I was told that I could get more time for conspiracy to riot I mean, there was no conspiracy, there was no riot, but they were actually, said they were going to prepare federal charges against me Which would have added years on to my prison sentence Hey, I was in the solitary for ten days, then they let me out and I said, we think your boys have done enough time in here Obviously they decided not to go ahead with any charges And I just bring that up because I did start smoking again at that point This is, if I've already been in prison for maybe over a year So although I had quit, when I first got in prison, I did start smoking again And I, if you've ever been a smoker, you know, it's very easy to get right back to where you were before And I did smoke when I got out, and I smoked for quite a number of years until my kids successfully guilt tripped me into quitting And I did quit in 1989, and I haven't smoked since then Congratulations, I'm glad you did that. I know the picture of the photograph is pretty bad, that was a good photograph and we don't have that many But yeah, it exposes me for the smoker I was In the 1960s, a transition happened in, I'd say, kind of mass attitude about religion Religion became, certainly on the more liberal ends of society, became kind of anathema It's like, I'm not going to let people tell me what to believe Which, I value that opinion, but I'm Quaker, so even though I'm part of religion, people won't tell me what to believe But there was a transition that happened during that time I have considerable respect for a number of religious people, I don't tend to lean fundamentalist in any way, shape, or form But a number of the people that were great supporters and co-workers with you Dan Berrigan and Paul Gibbons amongst them Were religious, how does that dovetail, or Martin Luther King, let's talk about him? These are people with a real strong religious base Right, and one of my character witnesses was a professor, a law professor, Cornell M. Harriman, who was a member of the Society of Friends, a Quaker So, no, I had close relations with a lot of the clergy on campus I'd say half of the Christian clergy assigned statements of support for draft resistance I mean, Paul Gibbons, I mentioned in connection with the East Harlem Project, became in his mid-30s The father of three, a minister, he'd turned in his draft card, along with other draft resistors As did the Catholic chaplain David, father David Connor, Paul was then prosecuted And he became, there was a huge story in the New York Times when he refused induction He became the first practicing minister who refused induction to the armed forces as a protest against the war So, we had tremendous support in the draft resistance movement from the religious community At Cornell, it was all housed in the building a hall on campus It was called Cornell United Religious Works And that became a headquarters for a lot of the anti-war students There was a coffee house there, there was like a big rec room where we had meetings I don't know, there didn't seem to be any gap between the non-religious people And the religious people, because of people like Father Berrigan, Reverend Gibbons, and Father Connor They were tremendously important in our movement, and I had tremendous respect for them I didn't really talk origin with them very much It wasn't a subject that came up in my conversations Although I do remember if you want to hear it, I can tell you a story about a very funny conversation I had with Father Berrigan We had gone to speak along with an anti-war profession and dug with Dad We did a lot of, the three of us did a lot of speaking together in the upstate New York area In western Massachusetts and that area against the war Father Dan would give his talk about what was wrong about the war President Dad would talk about the history of the war and Dan and I would talk about draft resistance And on one long drive, I guess I must have had a lot of hooks today, but I asked Father Berrigan Who you could talk about anything, Father Dan, do you really believe in this God stuff? We're fighting to ask a Jesuit priest, and he laughed, and he told me this story And the story was when he was growing up on a farm, he had four or five brothers, they lived near Syracuse, New York And the horse died, and the father gave him the job of burying the horse And he didn't want to do it, he did, he had to dig a big hole, it's a large animal He didn't do a very good job of burying it, he was feeling guilty about it And as he was walking away feeling guilty, the dead horse let out a big fart And to Dan, that was his answer, do you believe in God? And I got it, I got it, you know, but that's the kind of man he was I mean, he was definitely not into proselytizing non-Catholics to believe, but he, I think, as his moral guidance You know, his own principle, his own convictions was probably, as a good recruit for Catholicism, as anything I ever saw One of the phrases that we have in Quaker Circles is "Let your life speak" And I think that's equivalent, I think other Christian denominations say, you know, preach the gospel constantly Use words when necessary, it's like you live it out, that's what's important to end Yes, yes, well, certainly the baron and brothers dedicated their lives to protesting the war From the first day I met Dan when I was already a draft physician by the time he came to Cornell He said, you know, my goal is to provide the great support for draft resistance, to bring, that we can To bring adults into the resistance of the draft, and he certainly did that To his actions in the cadence online, when they destroyed a bunch of draft files Outside Baltimore, Maryland, and in the actions he's done throughout his life Yeah, there's so much good that those folks, you know, that both Dan and Phil did And there's so many luminaries for our generations There's so much of the book that we're not touching, again, the book, "Resister, a story of protest and prison During the Vietnam War, Bruce Danis with us here today for spirit and action There's so much about student politics, a really heady time to imagine that we as students could transform institutions in the United States Yeah, and I guess it also happened over in France Sure, well, it happened throughout the world I mean, I have a chapter in my book talking about 1968, and what was going on It was not just in France where they almost brought down the government of de Gaul A strike by students and workers, but I mean, massive demonstrations against the war And student movements in West Germany, and Great Britain, and Italy, and Japan Throughout South America, stuff was happening I think the sandamistas emerged in that era, even in the communist nation This is the time of the Prague Springs, when in Czechoslovakia, you know, they were trying to establish a communism of the human faith To bring, you know, greater freedom in the arts and in politics, and it was crushed by the Soviets But, you know, there was an uprising of youth all over the world It was very heady times, you did feel like, and of course, in Vietnam In Cuba, there was stuff going on, you know, the Vietnamese were resisting the United States You know, I mean, it was a very, it was a fascinating time, it was a scary time in some ways, but it was also inspiring I have to admit, and this comes with some of my own perspective on my own actions along the way Some of the demands of the students look immature to me, and from this perspective Some of them, I imagine, just wanted to create a little havoc Because, you know, it's the equivalent of a drinking party, but instead of being part of a frat Let's close the school for a week or something like that How much did you see that mix? Of course, you were on the serious end of it, you had serious objectives Sure, I did not see that, and look, the student movement and students were democratic society It was a very big organization, I mean, it was started sort of on the big state university campuses Like University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, and the Ivy League schools, like Cornell, like Harvard, things like that But by the late 60s, we were everywhere, we had chapters throughout the state college systems everywhere North, south, east, west, community colleges, high schools and all that And campus chapters were in a varying state of development I mean, we might have had 300 or 400 people come into every meeting of Cornell, SDS But in a community college, it'd be a much smaller group and they may be taking the first tentative steps To make a public protest against the war in Vietnam Whereas, you know, by 1968, that would have been sort of old hat for us But I thought, look, let me speak about my own experiences We were a multi-issue organization in 1968 and '69, in addition to opposing the war And recruit military recruiting and university complicity We got involved in an anti-apartheid campaign almost 20 years before it became a national movement We found out that Cornell University owned stocking banks that were investing to support the South African regime And it's apartheid policies And we found that the president of Cornell University was on the board of directors for Chase Manhattan Bank Which is one of those banks, so we made a big protest around that We also had a housing campaign I'm Ithaca, New York, is a relatively small town that's dominated by Cornell University and Ithaca College So students were coming in and wanted to live off campus And they would take up a lot of the lower cost rental housing Which put a tremendous squeeze on poor people in Ithaca and Compton County So we made a campaign demanding that the university build more housing both for its students And provide money for loans so that the city of Ithaca could build low income housing So I mean, those were serious issues that we pushed in addition to anti-war stuff And I don't think they were frivolous at all My other feeling is that people were putting themselves in risks You know, on draft resistance Students who were protesting against the war were subject to being reclassified 1A And we had quite a few examples of that at Cornell If you took an action against the university, you could get suspended, you could get a reprimand on your record, you could get probation You know, people were taking risks all the time Sure, in every movement you'll have people who are not serious who go along with the crowd But I thought, for the most part, what I saw was a lot of dedicated young people who were dead serious about what we were doing And formed values that they've kept for the rest of their lives Such a heady time, as we've said Again, the time is the late 60s, it's the Vietnam War draft resistance It's the topic, the authored, Bruce Dances, the book, "Resister a story of protest in prison during the Vietnam War" You come by a northern spirit radio.org, I'll point you in the right direction Cornell Press at Cornell.edu is the place perhaps I would first send you Since that's kind of home for Bruce at one point I did have a final question, Bruce, and that is Optimism You've seen a lot of change in your life I think racism, we've made steps I mean, who would have predicted in the late 60s that we'd have a black president As much as I hoped for that kind of change to come As well as having a woman president, or maybe a gay president As much as I hoped for those things, I didn't expect that I might be able to see it in my lifetime That the racism would still be too strong, even as adept How do you feel about war? I mean, recently President Obama evidently is proposing that we're going to draw down military spending to get back to pre-World War II levels That's amazing thought for me How optimistic do you feel about the transitions in this country? Well, partly, it's funny, when I started my activism was in civil rights It was giving people the right to vote who were denied the right to vote And to see the means that people predominantly Republicans are using now to deprive people of color and poor people The opportunity to vote is very alarming to me And sort of shocking that this is long after the civil rights movement and its gains that that's happened You know, that the Supreme Court could throw out some of the most important parts of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 You know, that shows me the limits to what we accomplished On the other hand, everything you said was right that I think the world for I think there are greater opportunities now for people of color for women Finally gay marriage is being more and more accepted in the country and that's long overdue I mean, people should be able to wed the person they love, I believe that for a long time I do think things move in cycles You know, you look at the abolitionist movement being unpopular at its time Eventually succeeding with the abolition of slavery Things go up and down, I mean, we have a period of ferment in the late 60s Followed by the Nixon years, in the Reagan years, but then things come up again I tend to be optimistic I do believe in the goodness of humanity When given all the information and given a chance, we'll do the right thing I think people do have a sense of justice in America I can get distorted at times, it's hard to fight against a movement that has a powerful TV network on its side And, you know, billion dollar think tanks pouring money into their cause Where our side generally doesn't have those kind of resources But I do think the power of our arguments and the morality of our positions will eventually prevail I write in my book, you know, I may not see it But I certainly hope it'll be true for my children and my grandchildren And your work back in the 1960s and since and in writing the book resistor I think all of them make that future more possible So I thank you for that work, Bruce, and thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action My pleasure, Mark The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northernspiritradio.org Thank you for listening I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light This is Spirit in Action With every voice, with every song We will move this world along With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing You
Bruce Dancis is author of Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War, was raised by secular Jewish parents, nurtured at the NY Society for Ethical Culture, and became a passionate advocate for social justice and student leader as a student at Cornell U.